


The Chain

by Lafayette1777



Category: Buzzfeed - Fandom, Buzzfeed Blue, Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: A whole lot of pining tbh, Falling In Love, First Kisses, M/M, Pining, Relationship Confusion, Theyre trying to fall in love but are way out of touch with their feelings, also the red cross mobile blood donation truck is involved, can you tell i would straight up die for ryan bergara, idk if ryan's a fleetwood mac kind of guy but i am hence the title, oh my god i just realized that im writing a fucking rom com, recovering from breakups, some angst some fluff you know me, there are some misadventures with jack daniels also, they fall in love via memes, theyre both fucking idiots naturally, what the fuck is this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-01-29 10:42:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12629253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: Do you not know how love works?Shane and Ryan, in transition.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> im back yall. with a multi chapter fic. crazy!! if you haven't yet, I suggest you go listen to "the chain" by fleetwood mac until your brain falls out your ear and you find yourself writing fucking buzzfeed fanfic. anywayyyyysss
> 
> ryan and shane don't sue me!!!!
> 
> enjoy folks!!

He wakes up thinking about South Dakota, about other unknown places, about emptiness. It probably has something to do with the cold half of his bed, a new and unnerving phenomenon. His girlfriend’s deserted bedside table stares at him until he feels like running, like hiding, like letting it all go. This is the morning routine, lately.

He rolls over to check his phone and finds that Shane has sent him a meme. 

And, for a moment, he forgets about everything else. 

 

 

Jake’s call comes in just as he’s trotting down the steps of the parking deck, Fleetwood Mac in his ears as he makes an ardent and valiant effort not to think. He lets it ring a few times, contemplating whether he has the energy for this conversation, then caves. 

“How’re you holding up?” Jake asks. Ryan can hear the swivel of his chair across linoleum; his brother is already at work, slogging his way through clinicals. 

“I’m fine, actually,” Ryan says, because that’s what the voice in his head has been insisting lately, and he’s starting to think it must be true—he woke up at 7:30 this morning like a functioning adult and only cried through half his post-workout shower. “I’m thinking about downloading Tinder.”

“That’s a good start.”

“Or I might just become a rancher in South Dakota so I never have to see anything that reminds me of her ever again.”

“...Less good.”

Across the street, a familiar, lumbering figure comes into view, waving languidly. 

“I gotta call you back,” Ryan says. “Shane’s here.”

Jake snorts. “He’s fucking weird. Have fun.”

Ryan hangs up on him and crosses the street at a jog to where Shane has stopped to wait, balancing unsteadily on the curb. “Blood truck,” Shane deadpans, by way of a greeting. It’s possible, Ryan thinks, that Jake has a point. 

“Blood truck?” asks Ryan, falling into step beside him. 

Shane points at the empty lot next to their offices, where a Red Cross vehicle has set up a tent and chairs to collect donations. Ryan wonders, idly, if his marrow can regenerate his entire being—if he can brew enough new blood in his bones to replace the man he is with someone new, someone unburdened. 

Or perhaps just a little bit braver. 

“Excellent use of the shook Mr. Krabs meme,” Ryan says, motioning toward his phone and this morning’s text. Over the last few weeks, Shane has taken to sending him a good morning meme—his attempt to offer encouragement and sympathy, Ryan thinks, but it’s not always easy to tell with Shane when it comes to his reasons for doing things. It’s better than anything offered by his other friends, at least—the ill-concealed looks of pity, vague references to _plenty of other fish in the sea_ , and other platitudes that make the bile rise in his throat. 

“You’re welcome.” Shane smirks. “Is that a fresh cut?”

Ryan runs a mildly self-conscious hand over the back of his freshly shorn hair. “It was a long time coming.” 

Then there’s a warm hand on the back of his neck, kneading at the downy remnants of his hair with something resembling revenance. Ryan closes his eyes, loses himself in the drift of Shane’s fingers across his head. He hears a sigh that is not his own. 

“You’re like a baby animal,” Shane says, laughter in his voice. 

“But shredded,” Ryan says, pulling himself out of the trance of Shane’s touch and flexing a bicep.

“But shredded.” Shane wheezes. His hand drops; Ryan tries not to mourn its absence. He looks back at Shane, but his eyes are stalwartly on the ground, even if his cheek is raised in a smile. 

 

 

Sometimes, when it’s dark and he’s alone, he thinks about The Test Friends. About the night they all got completely smashed to test the validity of the IV hangover cure. About a few hazy memories he can’t quite shake out of his peripheral vision. The lines in Shane’s smile, close enough to feel warm breath on his lips. Large hands, pressing into him. A dark corner. 

He wonders if he can trust his own memory, or lack thereof. 

He wonders why the thought lingers so gracelessly in his mind. 

 

 

Ryan has never been so glad to be staring down a sleepless weekend in the desert with a potentially bloodthirsty demon. And with Shane, too—roasting him for his fear, working through the logistics of the shoot, getting tipsy in strange little towns. It all seems far more attractively refreshing than it ever has before. 

He pictures it as a needle slides into the crook of his arm, closing his eyes against the prick and his own blood beginning to flow. The sun shines down, bright and unbothered, on the parking lot. Beside him, Steven Lim uses his unburdened arm to keep working on the laptop perched on his knees, even as the nurse drawing his blood scolds him. The world is still turning—these last few weeks Ryan’s been reminding himself of that, forcefully and at every opportunity.

And he’s still turning, too. 

Later, as they’re heading back towards their cars, he falls into stride with Shane again just as the air is beginning to cool around them. Neither says a word. He feels strong in a way he hasn’t in a long while, as though new blood is already flowing in his veins. And it’s strange, because Ryan honestly thinks he could do this forever—walk on and on, with the soft dark ahead of him and the warm sun behind. And with Shane, too, matching him step for step. 

 

 

Friday evening, he allots himself two duffel bags: one for clothes, and one for ghosthunting gear. Still, by the time he heads off to pick up Shane, he’s feeling lighter than he has in weeks. Shane folds himself into the passenger seat and gives Ryan an inexplicably thorough once over with his eyes narrowed. “You look unusually...buoyant.”

“I’m just ready to fuck with some demons.”

Shane snorts. “You always say that before you actually get anywhere near them.”

“And then I lose my shit completely.”

“And then you turn into a chickenshit.”

They both wheeze, and it sets the tone for the rest of the night—the flight, hunting down the rental car agency at one in the morning, the haphazard unpacking in a motel room on the edge of the New Mexico desert. Shane climbs into bed before him, and as Ryan slips into a ragged t-shirt he can feel eyes on his back, following him until he reaches to turn off the light. 

He doesn’t trust his voice to say goodnight, so he says nothing, and rolls over into sleep. 

 

 

 

“I swear to god, if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m going to buy a gun right now and shoot you.”

“And if you do,” Shane taunts. “I will haunt you so fucking hard.”

Ryan smirks. “But I thought ghosts weren’t real?”

“I will will them into existence just to fuck you up.” 

And then Ryan’s laughing, loosening some of the tension in his shoulders. The mesa rises up in the darkness somewhere behind them, and the desert night air is dry and cool. “Come on, demons, ghosts, all matter of unsightly creatures from the great beyond,” Shane drawls out again, addressing the inky black around them, and Ryan punches him in the kidney. 

They crunch through the scrubby foliage until their lights shine upon the desired structure: a ramshackle one story caretakers cabin, long abandoned. The windows have long since become empty, gaping maws; the walls have begun to lean at unfortunate angles. “Holy fuck,” says Ryan. “We’re really doing this.”

“Indeed we are,” chirps Shane, smacking him cheerfully on the shoulder. Then his hand falls to lead Ryan forward by the elbow, the shape of him warm and close in the heavy dark. 

Inside, the shack isn’t much more than three rooms, all of them dank and dirty and, in Ryan’s opinion, objectively haunted just on aesthetic alone. 

“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” Shane says, with his usual absurd inflection. 

“Sometimes book covers are well designed,” says Ryan. “Sometimes they’re remarkably representative of—”

“Of a portal to hell?”

“Sure,” says Ryan. A chill passes through him as they step over the threshold. “Or just hungry ghosts.”

The air is saturated with dust, permeated with a feeling of staleness—with one breath, it sets Ryan on edge. He pans his flashlight around the broken furniture and gardening equipment while Shane adjusts his GoPro minutely. “I’ll go in here, you go in there,” says Shane, motioning toward the two remaining rooms respectively. 

“...By myself?”

“Yeah, it’ll be good for you.” In the dark, it’s difficult to see Shane’s smirk, but these days Ryan hardly needs to see it to know it’s there. “Like a vitamin.”

“Please go fuck yourself.”

He knows Shane can’t help himself. “Maybe later?”

Ryan snorts and wanders into the room allotted to him. It’s darker than pitch and a solid ten degrees colder than outside, by his own estimation. He takes a long breath and waits for his eyes to stop picking human-shaped shadows out of the darkness. “If there’s anybody in here—” he begins, but is cut off almost immediately by a crash from the other room, and then an impressive swear. 

“Shane?” he calls, mostly because he wants an excuse to leave this terrific void of a room. He wanders over in the direction of the crash, expecting it, in truth, to be some sort of elaborate set-up for fucking with him. Shane is capable of worse, certainly. 

So there is definitively some sense of surprise when he finds Shane actually sprawled on the floor. 

Surprise, and then panic. 

“Shane?” His throat is tight, suddenly, and he’s aware of his legs pulling him forward with disturbingly little input from his brain. Shane is already picking himself up off the ground, dusting himself off, murmuring something about legs that are too long and doorways that are too short. But Ryan doesn’t hear. 

Because he’s surging forward, the new blood in his veins laced with adrenaline. His hands twist into Shane’s shirt, yanking him down until their gazes are level, their breaths mixing. There’s no hesitation, then—Ryan shifts, rolls forward on the balls of his feet, and they’re kissing. For all the intensity of the moment, it ends up soft—familiar, even, if Ryan were to think about it. Easy. He feels Shane lean in, hands coming up to Ryan’s back, as though unsurprised by this particular turn of events. 

He doesn’t realize it will have to end until it does. 

Shane pulls away, eyes on the floor. Ryan slowly uncoils his hands from Shane’s collar. They’re still standing too close in the dark, flashlights discarded in the heat of the moment. All Ryan can hear is his own heartbeat in his ears when he asks, “What happened?”

There’s a long moment where Shane just stares at him, as though he doesn’t understand the question. “I hit my head,” he says finally. “On the doorframe. Lost my footing. That’s why I yelled.”

“Oh.”

“Yep.”

Ryan remembers, abruptly, that he can’t usually see every crease around Shane’s eyes when he talks to him. He takes a halting step backward. “See any ghosts?” he jokes, but can’t quite get the smile to reach his eyes. 

“Just demons, unfortunately.” Something in Shane’s voice sounds thin, ragged, in a way it so rarely is. Ryan can’t help but wonder if that’s his doing, or just the head injury. 

They wrap shooting by midnight, and then they’re back out in the dry, quiet dark. And not even the cool night air can erase the flush from Ryan’s cheeks, or the tingle from his lips. 

 

 

 

The journey back to LA is very, very silent. 

The presence of the rest of the crew makes the late night ride back to Albuquerque easier, and the early morning flight into Burbank, too. But then it’s just two of them heading back into the city with the first threads of sunrise arcing across the horizon, Ryan behind the wheel. He thinks about turning on the radio, then decides that this emptiness is probably something they deserve for creating such an efficient, all-encompassing mess of themselves. 

Shane feigns sleep in the passenger seat. They’ll have to be at work in a few hours, seated beside each other. Ryan is possessed, suddenly, by the realization that this is the most unbearable moment in the universe, in any universe, even the one that’s bleeding over from the Bermuda Triangle. And that somehow his life is even more ruined than it was last week. He’ll have to change his name, he thinks. Quit Buzzfeed. Leave the state. Start running cattle in Sioux Falls. It’s all coming together, actually, when they pull up in front of Shane’s building. 

“Here we are,” grunts Ryan. 

Shane pretends to rouse himself, and Ryan tries hard not to roll his eyes. “Yep.”

“Um—”

“Should we talk about the, you know, the—”

“No, I don’t think we should.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t have to be—”

“Right.”

“Okay great, sounds good, bye,” says Shane, words falling out in a rush in the same moment as he leaps, with surprisingly agility, out of the car. The door slams, and then Shane’s trotting jaggedly up the steps to his building. 

It’s possible he glances back over his shoulder, once; Ryan doesn’t have the courage to look for himself. 

He waits until the light turns on in Shane’s third floor apartment, stares at his own white knuckled grip on the steering wheel, and then pulls out into the glowing morning once again. 

 

 

 

Shane appears at the office by noon, nursing an uncharacteristically large coffee. There's a bruise on his forehead, just below his hairline, an eggplant colored reminder of a door frame out for blood. Ryan sends him a weak smile when he sits down at his desk—an appeal to normalcy more than anything else. They don’t get a moment alone until the afternoon, in one of the break rooms that serendipitously empties out just as Shane enters. Ryan has set to work beside him, putting together his third coffee of the day, when Shane speaks. 

“It’s probably for the better, you know,” Shane says, his tone straining past casual. “If we just put it behind us.”

“Yeah—”

“Since you’re coming off a break up and all.”

“Yeah, definitely.” Ryan shrugs, makes a frazzled gesture next to his head. “I’m kind of out of it.”

“And since we work together and stuff.” Shane’s eyes are on his own hands, where he’s ripping open a sugar packet. “It’s better not to make things complicated.”

“Yeah, no big deal.” There’s a calm settling over Ryan, now—maybe their partnership is salvageable. He just needed a little human contact, he reasons, and was startled. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Doesn’t have to ruin what they have. 

“And it’s not like it’s the first time, anyways.”

Ryan freezes. “What?”

Finally, Shane looks up at him, an eyebrow raised. “You don’t—you know, when the Test Friends...the night before the IV therapy thing, when we were drunk—I think it was that bar in Echo Park…”

Ryan just stares. 

“You really don’t remember that?”

He shakes his head, and then manages to recover his voice. “I was pretty drunk.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Shane isn’t looking at him again. “Of course.”

Ryan swallows, hard, and wills his shoulder muscles to relax. “So we’re all good?”

“All good.” Shane puts a lid on his coffee, meets Ryan’s eyes for a quick, tight smile, and then is out the door in three quick strides. 

 

 

 

It’s a testament to the universe’s tendency toward maintaining the status quo that things do, eventually, smooth out. 

Because Ryan heals. He rearranges his apartment so that he hardly notices the empty spaces anymore. The concerned edge to Jake’s calls begins to soften. The urge to move to the Upper Plains states lessens. A little more new blood is born in his veins with every passing week, until two months pass and he’s due for another donation session with the parking lot blood truck. _The world is still turning._ He knows for certain now that he is, too. 

They shoot on location again and everything’s almost normal—jokes and EVPs and exasperation and phantom footsteps, in equal measures. They can meet each other’s eyes and smile again and Ryan only sometimes feels his heart leap in a way that’s just bordering on out of control. 

And then there’s the holiday party.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading guys!! your comments and kudos mean so much <33
> 
> in this chapter: the boys make some more questionable choices
> 
> enjoy!!

He’s a creature of habit, in truth—and perhaps that’s part of what stings so vehemently about a break-up. It disrupts rituals, and Ryan is a man of many. One of which, however, has remained unchanged: the three pm Friday upload of the latest Unsolved episode, and the frantic scramble beforehand to put the finishing touches on the edit. This week it’s the one from New Mexico, the one that Ryan had to bend over backwards to put together into something resembling the normal structure and patter of an episode. The one where he had to erase completely several blurry minutes of GoPro footage. He goes to great lengths not to recall why. 

But he finishes, that’s all the matters. The episode goes live and, as per the usual routine, he continually refreshes the page for a few minutes afterward just to watch the view count rise. Shane, today, slides over in his rolling chair to watch, snacking on a cliff bar in silence while the numbers crescendo upward. 

“It’s so strange,” he says simply, over Ryan’s shoulder. He’s still chewing. “Who the fuck are all those people?”

Ryan wheezes, then spins to look at him. “So, are you staying for the party tonight?”

“I wore my party flannel, so I think I have to.” He motions broadly to his red button-up. “Court order.”

“That looks like your ghost hunting flannel,” says Ryan, cocking his head.

“It’s multipurpose.” His arm is resting dangerously close to Ryan’s keyboard, the half-rolled sleeve beginning to slip downward. On a whim, Ryan reaches for it, his hands brushing the soft skin of Shane’s inner arm as he re-folds the fabric back up to elbow height. There’s a flash of heat where their skin touches; he can feel Shane’s eyes on him as warmth climbs up his face. He doesn’t look up. 

Ryan can probably guess how the rest of the night is going to go.

He decides not to. 

 

 

“My beautiful boys,” says Jen, sauntering up to them. She is tiny, and therefore already drunk. “We need more liquor.”

Ryan is still only in the mildly gyroscopically unstable phase of the evening—his frat boy alcohol tolerance is working against him tonight in the effort to get smashed. Shane hasn’t started singing yet, so he can’t be very far along either. 

“The basement freezer, then?” asks Shane. 

Jen applauds elatedly. “Ding ding ding!”

“That place is fucking creepy,” says Ryan, but he’s already following Shane toward the emergency staircase in the corner, past hordes of employees trying not spill drinks on their own laptops. 

“You should bring one of your voice recorders,” Shane replies, cantering down the concrete stairs ahead of him. “See if we can get any EVPs.”

“You think Buzzfeed is haunted?” says Ryan, a giggle bursting past his lips.

“This _is_ where humor goes to die.” He flicks on the light at the bottom, illuminating a drafty hallway stuffed with cleaning supplies, discarded props, and a couple industrial sized fridges. “Also, I want to hear what words you think the furnace is trying to say.”

Ryan is level with him now, standing one stair above while Shane looks at him with a smirk that looks just a little bit evil in the low light. Ryan asks, “Do you ever get tired of being a complete fucking dickhead?”

“No,” Shane deadpans. 

And Ryan kisses him. 

Again, Shane doesn’t seem terribly surprised. A hand comes up to cup Ryan’s cheek, another pulls him closer by the waist. He feels the jolt as Shane’s back hits the wall behind them, and then Shane is dropping to his knees, and on some distant plane of his mind Ryan notes that this is getting a bit out of hand. And that it’s odd that neither of them seems to care. 

 

 

“We should probably try to look like we didn’t just have sex,” Ryan is saying as they, finally, dig out a few twenty-four packs from the fridges. He still feels a little too hot, a little too disheveled, and Shane’s hair is somehow worse than usual. 

“Why?” Maybe Shane is drunker than he appears, but he looks rather unconcerned by the whole thing. Ryan laughs, and keeps laughing, and by the time they get to the top of the stairs, this all seems like it could almost be normal. 

“Well it’s about fucking time,” says Eugene, taking the drinks off their hands without a second glance. Ryan exchanges a look with Shane and gets only an achingly intimate smirk in response. 

The scene has devolved further on the main floor, and soon Ryan has a drink in his hand and has stopped caring all together what he looks like, or what anyone looks like. Except Shane, who he thinks looks delightful in this lighting, actually. But things start to blend together pleasantly, and he laughs and laughs and laughs at Shane’s side, and can’t imagine what on Earth there could possibly be to worry about. 

 

 

By four in the morning, the crowd has thinned out and things have moved downtown to one of the few all night clubs with no entrance fee. And maybe he has some inkling of the uncertainty the morning will bring; maybe four am always makes things feel a little more volatile, a little more urgent. But he ends up with Shane’s hands on him again, in the hallway leading to the bathrooms, trying to memorize every push and pull of his lips and breath and fingers. And again, there’s that alarming sensation: he doesn’t realize it’ll have to end until it does. Until Shane is pulling away. Then they’re outside and someone is prodding Ryan gently into an Uber, telling him to have sweet dreams just before the night swallows him whole. 

 

 

He spends the weekend home alone. It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to—to walk into a room and find it empty, to not hear the sounds of another person slithering in and out of his background consciousness. Now, though, he wonders what it would be like to have Shane filling that gap; to hear him shuffling about in the next room over, or humming in the shower. It’s a problematic line of interrogation. 

Ryan orders in Chipotle and wonders what he’s gotten himself into. 

He doesn’t see Shane on his own again until Monday midday, when they’re the last two left in a cramped conference room after the weekly production meeting has finished. Shane doesn’t move to get up and Ryan swivels forward just far enough to close the door with his foot. 

“Did we—on Friday night…” Shane asks, biting his bottom lip. 

“I think we did,” Ryan replies, willing himself not to blush. 

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, that.”

“I was just expressing frustration, but sure.” Shane is gripping the edge of the table with one hand, his knuckles turning white. He doesn’t seem to notice. 

“Frustration?” Ryan is trying very, very hard to keep his voice neutral. He knows he isn’t quite succeeding. 

Shane shrugs in exasperation. “We’re gonna fuck this up.”

“What the are you even talking about?”

“This. Us.” Shane is looking at him fully now, eyes flashing with intensity. He motions frantically between the two of them. “We work together. The show depends on us acting a certain way around each other.”

Ryan’s eyes narrow. “You think if we go any further, we’ll end up hating each other.”

Shane shrugs again, as though trying to convey that he’s out of his depth in this department—which Ryan truthfully doesn’t quite believe. “It feels like too much of a risk. We keep doing whatever this is, or more, and then—I dunno. If it goes sour, we still have to work together, and then everything sucks.”

Ryan chews his lip, contemplating. It all sounds about right. Logical, in the way that Shane always claims to be. He just doesn’t know why something stings in his chest at the thought. 

Finally, he nods in agreement. “So, never again? For real this time?”

Shane lips press together. “Yeah. For the good of Unsolved.”

“That’s fair.” He sticks out a hand, and Shane shakes it with exaggerated vigor and a smirk. “Agreed.”

Shane gets to his feet, brushing past Ryan towards the door. He pauses, though, with his hand on the knob, and turns back. “It was fun while it lasted, you know.”

Ryan stares at the door for a long time after he’s gone.

 

 

The slow, tilting motion of the Earth still does not stop, no matter how much Ryan expects it to. Turning, turning, turning, he thinks, and then stares at his laptop screen until his eyes dry out. 

There’s only a week left until everyone leaves for the holidays, and Ryan thinks that maybe it’ll be a chance to reset, somehow. It’s been a few months since the break-up, a few weeks since his mom has stopped calling him weekly to both comfort and berate him in the same breath. Maybe a new year is what he needs. And, at the very least, it’ll be a distraction from the mess of the last few days. 

If he thinks about it, then there’s something strange there: his life, recently, has taken on the rather odd quality of revolving all too often around Shane.

In the meantime, they have one more episode to shoot before the break—a haunted movie theater in LA, staying open extra late Wednesday night for their investigation. 

“Ready to pop some kernels with the ghouls?” asks Ryan on Wednesday morning, ripping open a package of microwave popcorn and extending it to Shane. It might be an offering—of peace, or something else. 

“I’m always ready, baby,” replies Shane, reaching a too-large hand into the bag. 

“Don’t call me that,” Ryan mutters, and ignores the eyes on his back until Shane turns back around to his own screen. 

In the evening, Ryan and the crew are already setting up by the time Shane unfolds himself from an Uber. He looks like he’s just rolled out of a nap, and musses his hair further with an absentminded hand while they finish getting ready to shoot. If he notices Ryan is staring, than he doesn’t show it. 

“Nice ghost hunting flannel,” Ryan says, once they’ve finished with the intro and are gearing up for the investigation proper. 

Shane helps him adjust the straps on his GoPro and says, laughing, “Yeah, it still smells like liquor from Friday.”

He doesn’t say _and you_ , but it hangs in the air as they head toward the projection rooms. The hallways are forties vintage and caked with the debris of half a century; they keep the lights off and as a result have to keep dodging discarded posters and broken chairs haphazardly as they go. 

“I dunno,” says Shane. “There’s just something so inherently pleasant for me about a movie theater. I’m having a hard time mustering any sense of fear.”

Ryan turns and hopes Shane can make out his eyeroll. “Are you not compelled?”

“You know me so well, Ry.”

Ryan just snorts. “I just know you’re an asshole.”

The area with the most reported activity is the projection room at the end of the hall, so Ryan points himself in that direction after taking a fortifyingly deep breath of the thick air. Shane follows close enough behind that occasionally Ryan can hear him sigh. 

“This feels so wrong,” Ryan says, and wonders if he’s talking about the ghosts. He frowns and adds, “It’s too quiet.”

“We should have brought a movie to watch with the ghouls.”

“Which one?” wheezes Ryan. 

“Is _The Sixth Sense_ too obvious? Or _Ghost_? 

“The only acceptable answer is _Poltergeist_ ,” counters Ryan. 

“These are all cliches and I’m disappointed in both of us,” says Shane, just as Ryan steps on something that crackles underfoot. It sends him leaping backwards with a screech; the only reason he doesn’t hit the dusty ground is because Shane’s hands grab his shoulders, keeping him upright but sending them both stumbling backwards. “Jesus, Ryan—”

“There was—”

“A fucking Twix wrapper,” says Shane, his flashlight beam landing on the offending item. “Possibly haunted, I suppose.”

“Wouldn’t want to jump to any conclusions,” snorts Ryan, catching his breath. Shane’s hands are still on his shoulders, warm and solid. It’s distracting. 

“Onwards, then?” Shane asks, finally releasing his grip. He motions toward the beckoning void of the doorway to the projection room.

Ryan lets out a long breath. “Onwards.”

 

 

They wrap filming, and the night only unravels from there. 

There’s a bar across the street. All it takes is someone on the crew mentioning how much they’re dreading heading home for the holidays and then they’re all seated in a booth, throwing back shots full of seasonal self-pity. Ryan isn’t a particularly big fan of Irish whiskey, but he ends up drinking a lot of it before they move on to tequila, and then something else that Ryan doesn’t see poured but tastes like he’s giving the devil a blowjob. That last part he must say out loud; Shane is laughing, their shoulders brushing together. 

Eventually, the bars close—they end up on the sidewalk, tottering around like blades of grass pushed by the breeze. Ryan collides with Shane’s shoulder and they both laugh hysterically, Shane’s arms the only thing keeping him upright. The others in the group are starting to slip off into the night in cabs and Ubers, and at some point Ryan’s eyes begin to refocus and he recalls vaguely that today is Wednesday, as though that has some significance. 

“I don’t think I can make it home by myself,” he finds himself saying to Shane, who is still towering over him, their arms linked for balance. 

He should probably know better. 

Shane looks at him for a long moment. “You want to share a cab?”

“Yeah, exactly.” He swallows. His thoughts are running away from him, mouth moving illogically. “So I don’t get fucking murked.”

A blurry few minutes later they’re pulling up in front of Ryan’s building, pressed unnecessarily close together in the back of the cab. Shane disentangles himself as Ryan reaches for the door handle. Ryan is still talking, but it feels like the words are forming of their own accord. “It’s still pretty far to your place.”

Shane is watching him intently, something both tender and covetous in his gaze. “Yep.”

“You could stay over.”

“Oh.”

“If you wanted.”

Shane’s bottom lip is caught between his teeth. There is silence. “That’d be good.”

And then they’re out on the sidewalk, fingers interlacing. And even as he feels himself sobering up in the night air, Ryan finds that it’s like the movement of the tide. Or the turn of the Earth. 

There’s no stopping this.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, thanks so much for all the comments and kudos!! I am very grateful and it means so much. Enjoy <3

Shane is sitting on one of the picnic tables, chin in his hands. He looks like someone else—so rare is it to see him without a trace of mirth in his expression. Or irony, or exasperation. Ryan chews on his thumbnail and wonders what expression has crawled onto his own face. 

They’re alone in the courtyard, under a weak December sun. Weak, perhaps, but still strong enough to tweak the hangover still churning behind Ryan’s eyes. It’s Thursday. The week has never felt so long. 

He paces in front of Shane for a few moments before coming to a tired stop. “Okay, new plan.”

“Shoot.”

“Friends with benefits,” says Ryan. “We can’t fuck that up, right?”

Shane lets out a long breath, and nods in agreement. “Either that or we can never come within three feet of each other ever again.”

“That might be a bit logistically difficult.”

“Maybe we can get Eugene to sit between us and absorb some of the sexual tension.” Finally, Shane cracks a smile, and Ryan feels one spreading across his own face, too. He wonders, not for the first time, if maybe the universe can right itself once again. No matter how many times they manage to throw it all off balance. 

Just then, Sara and Quinta round the corner, lunches in hand. Shane leaps off the table, looking guilty. 

Quinta’s eyes narrow. “Are we interrupting something?”

“Nah, we’re just heading back in,” Ryan replies quickly. He’s not sure why he lies—maybe it just feels easier than any attempt at an explanation. Even friends with benefits feels more complicated than it should be. 

Sara cocks her head curiously, but doesn’t get a word out before Ryan is hurrying back toward the offices, Shane on his heels. 

Once they’re out of sight, though, Ryan pauses. He takes a moment to confirm their solitary status with a quick swivel of his eyes before looking back at Shane. “Okay, so crisis averted?”

Shane nods. “Friends with benefits.”

Ryan holds his hand out for another shake, but Shane just uses it to pull him into a hug with an overly aggressive pat on the back. “Love you, bro,” Shane mutters in his ear, in his best impression of someone with a much thicker neck and much less nuance. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Ryan snorts, pushing him away by the chest and turning toward the door back inside. 

“Is that how you used to hug your frat brothers?” Shane asks, still smirking as he follows him in. 

“Only the ones I was fucking,” Ryan quips, turning back to send him a smile somewhere between mocking and lascivious. 

“Oh, Ryan,” Shane says, with an exaggerated gasp. “ _Scandalous_.”

The rest of the day is taken up with filming a video about expensive underwear, after he agrees to the casting call in a spur of the moment need to get away from his desk. It’s itchy, sitting next to Shane—the new agreement somehow hasn’t put him at ease. It’s better to spend the afternoon wearing four hundred dollar underwear on his head than it is to deal with what he does or doesn’t want to do to Shane. 

He doesn’t head back to his desk until late in the day. He can tell from across the room that Shane has already bolted for the evening; he’s still trying to decide what to make of that when a hand wraps around his wrist. The fingers are cold—he succumbs to a rather undignified jump at the touch. 

“Jesus, Ryan, calm down,” Quinta says.

“How do you expect me not to shit myself if I spend half my time trying to avoid getting followed home by literal demons?” he retorts, voice rising an octave in defense of himself. 

Quinta rolls her eyes, but her tone is quiet when she asks, “Is everything okay?”

“We’re living in the end times, Quinta,” he replies, without thinking. And then: “Oh, you mean, like, in _my_ life?”

“You and Shane…” Her gaze is boring into him, and Ryan averts his eyes. “You two seem weird.”

He is silent for a moment, contemplating whether it’s likely that she’s actually seen something—at the holiday party, maybe. He was too drunk to pay much attention to discretion. It seems to be becoming a habit. He makes a snap decision. “It’s, uh...complicated?”

She nods without a hint of surprise in her expression. “It always has been between the two of you, hasn’t it?”

“Is it obvious?”

“A little,” she replies, with a smile that indicates the opposite. 

He scratches self-consciously at the back of his head. “I don’t think I can talk about this.”

“Without blushing?”

His face does, in fact, feel alarmingly warm. “Apparently.”

“Well, if you ever do want to talk.” She squeezes his arm, stepping back toward her desk. “No one wants to see you get your fragile little heart broken.”

“Is that how you all think of me?” he laughs. “I’m a grown man.”

Quinta smirks at him. “Barely.”

“And my heart is hardly involved. It’s not a big deal.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Okay.”

“I swear.”

“Great. Have fun,” she says over her shoulder. 

“I will. Because my heart is strong, and not little,” he replies, unsuccessfully willing the defensiveness out of his voice. “And also not at risk, because, um—”

She’s not listening. 

 

 

On the way home he gets honked at when he waits too long at a stoplight in an attempt to get a picture of one of the gigantic, waving, inflatable creatures in front of a car dealership. He sends the blurry picture to Shane with the message _look it’s you._

_Fuck you_ , Shane replies. Then: _I’m coming over._

Ryan wonders vaguely if, on some level, that was exactly the response he was hoping Shane would have. 

“Have you come to exact revenge?” he asks, when Shane appears on his doorstep. 

“Something like that,” is the reply, and then Shane’s lips are on his. He stumbles backward, pulling Shane closer. It’s different, now that they’re both sober. Better. He has to force himself not to smile into the kiss. 

 

 

 

He goes home for the holiday. 

It’ll be a good break, he thinks. A moment to get away from the Buzzfeed vortex, away from the pull of Shane—they both have a tendency to skew the universe enough to make things even more disorienting than they should be. Still, Christmas Day he finds himself sitting on the back stoop of his parents house, nursing a hot chocolate and still feeling decidedly out of sorts. 

He hears the screen door creak open, and soon Jake is sitting down heavily beside him to stare at the scrubby backyard. And then, out of nowhere: “You’re in love with the fucking hot dog guy, aren’t you?”

Ryan’s head whips around. “What? Why would you think that?”

“Last time you called me, you talked for ten straight minutes about what a giant dickhead he was for calling you on all your haunted bullshit.” Jake gives a jaded sigh. “And now you’re angsting. On Christmas.”

“Well, that’s not how it is.” Ryan frowns. “He is a dickhead, though.”

Jake just gives him an unimpressed look. “He’s fucking weird. But he’s your kind of weird.”

“He’s such an asshole.” Ryan isn’t looking at him. “People think it’s just his on screen personality but he’s seriously like that in real life.”

“Oh my god, you won’t shut the fuck about him.”

“Because he’s ruining my life!” Ryan retorts, his voice going breathy with indignation. And maybe it’s true—something like anger is rising inside him. Not at Shane, though. Not quite. Yes, the world is turning, he thinks. In fact, he’s pretty sure it’s spinning out of control. 

 

 

 

Shane is two time zones away in Illinois, but he still sends Ryan his usual morning meme. Nine am his time, seven am Ryan's time. This morning it's a derivative of some dank Kermit meme that Ryan only half remembers. Still, he snorts into the December morning gloom.

Life without Shane isn’t empty, per se—it’s just a little bit out of tune. The office is empty, so he works from home, even though he doesn’t have any hard deadlines until the new year. It’s not the reset he was hoping for. Thoughts of Shane still hover around the periphery of his life, ghost-like in their ephemerality. Staring him down with an even gaze as though asking, honestly, if this all seems like a good idea. If this won’t just implode, eventually, and leave him hurting again. Contemplating new blood and South Dakota. It’s possible that nothing ever really changes, he thinks; that this tilting Earth keeps everything in check in a way that’s only meant to constrict him, endlessly and painfully. 

They’ll ruin Unsolved; they’ll ruin each other. 

It’s hard to imagine any other eventuality. 

Shane isn’t the sort for commitment, or feelings. Ryan probably isn’t either. Not now, at least. It’s possible he was at one point but he’s a new man now, with new blood, and he’s not going to feel empty again. This is a decision he makes at four in the morning, staring at the ceiling resolutely. Then he wonders, idly, what meme Shane will send him in a few hours, and hopes that it will have something to do Star Wars. 

 

 

 

Shane comes home in time to film the New Mexico postmortem, slightly outside of their usual schedule because of the holiday disruption. They resume life with a sense of normalcy that Ryan finds almost ridiculous. Shane smacks him on the back of the head in greeting, and then slips off while Ryan picks out the questions for the day on his phone with one of the interns. Later, he looks up to see Shane deep in conversation with Sara Rubin, far out of earshot from him. Ryan has often wondered, in the past, if there had been something between her and Shane; now, he just wonders whether Sara has fallen victim to Shane’s aversion to workplace relationships as well. 

On the other side of the room, Quinta is watching him watch Shane with an expression both amused and pitying. A moment later she’s sliding into the seat next to Ryan and leaning forward to look him in the eye. “You know you can’t just stare at each other forlornly forever, right?”

“That was not forlorn,” Ryan retorts. “That was mild curiosity at best. We have to shoot in forty minutes.”

Quinta lets out a long sigh. “Whatever, just be gentle with him. He was born in the year of the tiger. They’re sensitive.”

“Why do _I_ have to be gentle with _him_?” Ryan sputters. “He’s way more of an asshole than I am.”

She laughs. In his peripheral vision, he can feel Shane and Sara glance at them in tandem. 

Quinta throws up her hands. “Whatever.”

But he doesn’t miss the look she exchanges with Sara when she heads back to her own desk. 

Later, he sleepwalks through the meat of the postmortem, but by the time they get to the next installment of the Hot Daga he’s bored enough that he lets a hand settle on Shane’s thigh under the table, so that Shane’s voice trips in the middle of some notably expository dialogue. Ryan tries to tamp down his smirk and lets his hand slide slowly upwards along the inseam of Shane’s jeans, until this chapter of the Hot Daga comes to an abrupt end. And then they’re rushing through the wrap-up, mentioning something banal about next week’s episode, signing off cheerfully.

Then the camera’s off; it’s just the two of them. 

“You coming over tonight?” Shane asks. It’s a question, but just barely. 

“I suppose,” says Ryan, a coy smile lifting just the edge of his mouth. 

Shane just rolls his eyes. He’s wearing a sweater, but underneath it Ryan can see the collar of one of his tiki shirts peeking out. “You look like someone’s dad,” Ryan snorts. 

Shane’s eyebrows shoot up. “Are you into that?”

“Fuck off.”

He’s already laughing when Ryan shoves him halfheartedly away, brushing briskly past him toward the door. He’s not fast enough, though—Shane grabs his ass on the way out and sends them both wheezing back to their desks. 

 

 

 

He shows up at Shane’s apartment by eight, is ushered inside with a kiss, with a large hand creeping up under his shirt and spreading warmly across the skin of his back. Ryan closes his eyes and leans in. 

Shane breaks away, after a moment, but keeps the two of them pressed close together. His voice is soft. “I missed you.”

And Ryan doesn’t know what to say.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this one took a little longer than usual! my parents were visiting me and i had an exam, but thanks for your patience <33

The motel has a pool.

It’s midwinter in northern Idaho, but Shane has brought a bathing suit, for some fucking reason. And of course he’s feeling smug about it, too—because there’s an indoor pool and he’s about to fling himself into it, while Ryan stands at the side in jeans and a sweater. 

“So much better than a jacuzzi tub with broken jets, Ryan,” Shane says, surfacing long enough to shake the wet hair out of his eyes. 

“This is so fucking unfair.”

“It be like that sometimes.” He’s floating languidly on his back, pale chest rising up out of the water. 

“Fuck you.”

“The thing is,” Shane says, eyebrows raising. “I’m not entirely sure why you’re still wearing clothes.”

“I’m not getting naked in public, Shane.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Just wear your fucking underwear, Ryan. It’s the same as a bathing suit.”

Ryan lets out a long sigh, but doesn’t move. 

“All that time at the gym and you’re gonna stand there and pretend like you don’t want to take your shirt off.”

“Shut the fuck up, Shane.”

“What if I drown?” he asks, pushing back off the wall. “You’re the only one around to save me.”

“I guess you’ll just die,” Ryan says, but he’s already pulling off his sweater, and then the t-shirt beneath it, and Shane is wolf whistling at him from the center of the pool. 

“Come here, motherfucker,” says Ryan, and dives in. When he comes up for air, Shane is waiting for him, and then they’re wrestling—doing their best to drown each other as an excuse to press skin to skin. He eventually succeeds in shoving Shane under for long enough that he pretends to die, letting himself sink dramatically to the bottom, and then in a moment of weakness Ryan dives down to save him, scooping him up bridal style and kicking them both to the surface. 

“My hero,” says Shane, giving Ryan a saccharine pat on the cheek before wrapping him in a headlock.

They don’t head back up to the room until the sun has set, sending them shivering in along the covered walkways toward their door. Ryan fumbles with the key and in the intervening moment Shane has draped himself over him, his chin resting on top of Ryan’s head, grasshopper arms coming up to encircle his waist. Ryan sighs; he can’t help it. He soaks in the warmth, leans back into the embrace, and takes far longer than necessary to push open the door. 

 

 

The motel isn’t haunted; it’s the logging site thirty miles up the road where a presence apparently lingers. They rise early, dress in layers; at some point Ryan becomes aware of the fact that he and Shane have probably switched shirts, but it’s too cold to lift up his sweater and know for sure. They eat breakfast in a roadside diner in Coeur D’Alene, bent over hashbrowns and runny eggs, the burgeoning morning light mixing with pre-investigation exhilaration. And Ryan wonders if this is going to be the rest of his life. Or if it can be, if he asks for it. 

Shane meets his eyes across the table, gaze steady and soft. There’s something secure in the meeting of their expressions, the meshing of their thoughts. Ryan realizes he’s trying to memorize this moment, to pull it to the forefront of his mind whenever he blinks. 

If Shane’s going to look at him like that, than he’s going to remember it. 

 

 

It’s a gray day in the heavy pine forest they’ve pulled into, and then a snowy trek toward where the remains of the logging cabins still stand. Shane seems unaffected by the temperature, wearing an absurd combination of down and denim, while Ryan makes a point of letting everyone know that he still thinks all weather of any kind is Bad and Useless. 

They set up the gear out in the open while shivering pathetically under a disinterested expanse of sky. Then Ryan’s hesitating in front of the broken door into the first cabin, bracing himself against both the cold and what lies inside. 

“Come on, Ryan,” says Shane, bouncing on his heels. 

“Are you cold, big guy?” Ryan taunts. 

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Because I think you’ll lose your weird-midwestern-guy membership card if you are.”

“I know.” Shane sighs. “But at least I wasn’t born California weak.”

“Oh my god, fuck you.” Somehow, Shane has lead him inside now—they’ve crossed the threshold without Ryan even noticing, or remembering to be scared. 

“So, point us in the direction of the ghouls, Ryan.”

“That room is apparently where everyone got axe-murdered,” says Ryan nodding toward the next doorway. The roof has fallen in in some places, throwing heaps of snow onto rusty tools that hang on the walls and litter the floor. 

“Do you think the axe is still in there?” Shane asks, eyes going comically wide. 

“Um, no,” Ryan replies, then pauses. “I’m gonna lose my shit if it is, though.”

“I believe you.”

“Yeah?”

“I believe in your ability to shit yourself far more than I believe in ghosts,” Shane says, shrugging. “Which truthfully isn’t saying much.”

“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Ryan snorts out. 

Shane sends him a small, fond smile. “You know it really isn’t.”

Something twists in Ryan’s gut—something nervous, but indescribably warm. “I know.”

Then Ryan is leading the way into the murder room, just opening his mouth with some pre-prepared commentary, when there’s a heavy thump, somehow both metallic and fleshy, from behind him, and a swear, and another thump when Shane’s ass hits the dirty floor. “Oh my god,” Ryan says, turning around. “Did you smack your gigantic fucking head again—”

But there’s blood, this time, actually. 

“Umm—” Shane says, looking pale. He’s looking at the blood on his hand, from where his palm had come up to touch the cut on his forehead. The cut that’s still dripping blood into his left eyebrow rather intently. “Ryan—”

“Don’t move.” Ryan’s feet move of their own volition; suddenly he’s kneeling at Shane’s side. “And don’t pass out.”

“Working on it.”

For all that he’s not a fan of needles, Ryan doesn’t actually mind seeing other people’s blood. Shane, in contrast, is looking increasingly gray in the face, his lips set in a thin line. To his credit, he doesn’t try to stand up. Someone from the crew runs off to look for a rag to staunch the bleeding, but already the blood is dripping onto Shane’s ghosthunting flannel, staining it a darker red. Meanwhile, Ryan can’t help but note distantly that the cameras are still running, and that somehow he’s ended up holding Shane’s free hand. The one that isn’t pressed white against his forehead. 

“Oh,” Shane says, his voice thin. He’s looking at a droplet of blood on the bottom hem of his flannel. “My shirt.”

“We can soak it out, I bet,” Ryan says, a little desperately. 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah, I think it’s salvageable, man.” Ryan takes a deep, steadying breath. “I can think all of it is.”

Shane just squeezes his hand, looking dazed. 

While Shane has always been one for drama, he doesn’t quite manage to pass out, though he does spend the whole drive to the ER staring blankly out the window with someone’s t-shirt pressed against his head. Most of the bleeding has stopped by the time they arrive—he gets checked for a concussion and stitched back together quickly enough, but it takes longer for the color to return to his face, and for Ryan to stop feeling something vaguely hysterical climbing up his throat. It’s all a little bit melodramatic, Ryan thinks, and immediately blames Shane. 

“I blame my legs,” Shane says, climbing gingerly into bed just as the sun is setting through the curtains of their motel room. “They’re too long.”

“I agree,” Ryan says, but there’s something still a little ragged in his voice. 

“You good?” Shane asks, perfectly nonchalant. As though he wasn’t the one reduced to spooked silence by the sight of his own blood a few hours ago. 

“Yeah.”

“You don’t like seeing blood?”

“I don’t like seeing _your_ blood,” Ryan replies, staring out the window and scratching self-consciously at the back of his head. “So much of it. Outside of your body.”

“Oh, Ryan,” Shane sighs out, throwing a dramatic arm over his head like a damsel in a fifties movie, but wincing when he brushes the fresh bandage pasted next to his scalp. “Ohhhhh, Ryan.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I didn’t pass out, and you shouldn’t either.”

“You’re such a fucking dick.” Finally, something like a proper smile is pulling at his mouth. 

“Come here.”

Ryan obliges, settling in beside him on the bed and letting Shane wrap his too long limbs around him. He feels himself deflate into the touch. 

“What do we call this, then?” Shane murmurs into his hair. “Friends with cuddles? Benefits with cuddles?”

“Don’t ruin this.”

There’s a pause; the air shifts. “I don’t know how not to.”

Ryan sighs, closing his eyes. “It’s nothing, if you want,” he mutters. “It’s just us.”

Shane just hums. It’s not quite an affirmative noise. Ryan finds himself thinking about new blood again—Shane will have some too, now, he supposes. Both of them, inching toward new men, one blood cell at a time. 

 

 

They’re allotted enough time by the bosses to book a few more days in Idaho and salvage the shoot, and the next day they’re back at it with a spirit box and a voice recorder and their GoPros, even though Shane has a nasty bruise already peeking out from under his bandage. “Ghosthunting is serious business,” he tells the camera, at one point. “Don’t try this shit at home.”

“Can I tell everyone a ghost hit you with a rusty shovel?” Ryan asks, smirking. 

“You can fucking try, baby.” Shane’s eyes narrow. “But I think you’ll find the video evidence tells a different story.”

“That’s what they want you to think,” Ryan says to the camera, with a cheeky wink. 

“Who the fuck is _they_?” Shane laughs out. “It’s your fucking footage!”

The conversation devolves from there, and as the sun sets they’re back on the winding, snowy road, destined for their flight out of Boise the next morning. They have to drive through the night, and Shane’s not supposed to drive with his head injury, so Ryan settles in behind the wheel with a coffee and as much sheer force of will as he can muster. 

And Shane, because he’s an asshole, falls asleep within ten minutes. 

The darkness is enveloping; they could be speeding through time itself, or something else unknowable. The world blurs. Ryan thinks about that afternoon, months ago, when he’d felt like he could walk forever, with Shane at his side. The feeling is the same, now—the two of them, strong and with fresh blood, hurtling off into the night. Shane peaceful in the passenger seat. Everything’s within reach, he thinks, if they’re willing to keep going. 

 

 

It’s late afternoon by the time they get back to LA—too late to bother with work, or even showers. There’s no discussion required; they end up on Ryan’s couch, Shane with an icepack on his head, watching basketball because Shane doesn’t seem to have the strength to argue. Or maybe because Ryan has made him popcorn, because he looks a bit pathetic and because it always manages to shut him up. 

“I don’t want to go home,” Shane groans, once the sun has set. His feet are in Ryan’s lap, and he’s had to contort the rest of his body ridiculously to fit on the couch. 

“Why not?”

“What’s the point of being in pain if there’s no one to complain at?” Under tired eyes, Shane is smiling at him, and Ryan squeezes his bony ankle in sympathy. 

“What if you, like, stayed?” he finds himself saying, with something like a blush warming the tips of his ears. “Just a little longer.”

“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Shane replies, then motions toward the TV. “I wanna see if the Cowboys win.”

“Wrong sport.”

“I don’t need you mansplaining to me, Ryan.”

Ryan wheezes. “You’re right. My bad.”

“So I’ll stay,” Shane says, shifting slightly into a more comfortable position. His heel jabs into Ryan’s crotch, and Ryan yelps. 

“So you will, asshole.”

 

 

He doesn’t, though. Not entirely. By morning Shane has cleared out. There’s no note left behind, no sign that he was ever there at all, except that Ryan is still wearing a shirt that is not his own.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the power went out in my apartment in the middle of writing this so i feel like that's a sign?? of something?? who knows
> 
> at any rate the entire reason i wrote this fic is so I could write this chapter, so enjoy!!

There are some good things about Shane, he thinks. Many good things, truthfully, but the first thing he thinks of in the morning, when confronted with the cold half of his bed and an empty apartment, is that Shane has perfect pitch, which while not particularly useful in daily life is sort of entertaining nonetheless. To hear Shane hum a B flat at will, absentmindedly—perfectly in tune with the universe without a second thought. There is something charming about it, definitely. Something he wishes he could hear coming from the shower, fading in and out of the background noise of his mind. 

Regardless, he goes to work angry.

Angrier than he has any right to be, probably. He’s not sure he actually has a right to feel anything, when it comes to Shane. _It’s just us_ , he’d told Shane in Idaho. It was meant to be palliative, something to smooth over the wrinkles in whatever this is or isn’t between them, but now it feels constrictive. Because it’s not really true—it’s never been just _us_. The rest of the world is out there, turning away, and eventually it’s going to shift an eye their way, he imagines. Something is going to have to happen. He just doesn’t know what. 

Shane comes in later than usual, freshly showered, the band-aid on his head ringed by a yellowing bruise. He nods in Ryan’s direction. Ryan’s not sure what he expected, but suddenly it seems best to accept Steven’s last minute casting call for something dubiously Worth It related. It gets him away from his desk, from Shane, from thoughts of the last few days. It’s something to do. 

Quinta Brunson falls into step with him on his way to lunch. 

“Are you going to Eugene’s party this Friday?” she asks, apropos of nothing, and Ryan can’t help but narrow his eyes in suspicion. 

“Why?”

“Why should you go or why am I asking?”

“Both.”

“Because it’ll be fun.” Quinta shrugs. “And Shane’s going.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” It’s possible that it comes out a little sharper than he expects. Quinta raises an eyebrow. 

“Take it easy,” she retorts. “That was a perfectly innocuous piece of information.”

He scratches at the back of his head. “Well, uh—whatever.”

“So you’re going, then?”

“I have no idea.” He sighs. “But I’m flattered that you think I plan my life more than an hour before I absolutely have to.”

“Oh, Ryan.” She rolls her eyes. “I’ve seen the sticky notes on your desk. Don’t pretend that you’re as disorganized as the rest of us.”

She turns onto the street and leaves Ryan alone in the courtyard to nibble half-heartedly on a sandwich and wonder why, exactly, everything feels so hopeless all of the sudden. 

 

 

He finally runs into Shane on the way to the recording rooms, and nearly spills his coffee on him in a combination of surprise and unconscious spite. Shane has an armful of notes for Ruining History, and tries for a smile when he meets Ryan’s eyes. Ryan doesn’t quite manage to return it. 

“You didn’t stay,” Ryan blurts out.

Shane has abruptly begun to resemble a caged animal. “I thought it might be better if—”

“Why didn’t you just write me a fucking text?”

“Because—”

“That’s bullshit, dude.”

“Look, can we just not fucking do this at work?” Shane isn’t caged, anymore; he’s exasperated, anger creasing the sides of his mouth. 

“Fine. Fuck it.” Ryan brushes past him. “Postmortem at five.”

“Yeah.”

He can feel Shane’s eyes on him as he walks away. 

 

 

Shane arrives in Ghoul HQ two minutes before they’re meant to film the postmortem without a trace of residual displeasure in his expression. His chipperness in front of the camera is almost unnerving, but it still manages to spread to Ryan, somehow—they settle into a rhythm that’s almost normal. 

“The spirit box is absolute fucking nonsense,” Shane says definitively to the camera, spreading his long hands out on the table in front of them. 

“I’m going to take the _real fucking science_ behind the spirit box and shove it up your ass,” Ryan replies, smirking. 

“Oh,” says Shane, raising his eyebrows cheekily for the camera. “Kinky.”

“Oh my fucking god.”

Then Ryan is busy tuning out the Hot Daga, letting his mind wander to the strangeness between them, purposefully avoiding any thoughts of what comes after this. He finishes off the shoot on autopilot, hardly notices when Shane starts reaching for his stuff. 

“You heading home?” he manages to ask, once Shane is at the door. 

“Yeah, I guess.” Shane shrugs. “It’s hard to focus, sometimes, you know—”

“Yeah.”

Shane’s hand is on the knob. Ryan still feels out of focus, floating somewhere above the mess between them—perhaps still caught up in the night before, in the close familiarity of Shane, and then the cognitive dissonance of his absence. “It’s just—” Ryan scratches absently at the back of his head. “It’s just that sometimes I really wish I knew how to quit you.”

“Don’t quote _Brokeback Mountain_ at me,” Shane says. He’s smiling; it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. 

“I was hoping you wouldn’t catch that.”

“I’m insulted.” He laughs, almost. They both try to. Then he’s out the door, and Ryan is left staring at the closed door.

 

 

He goes to Eugene’s party, because it’s something to do that’s not sitting at home. Because he can feel something like anxiety still seething beneath his skin, and the only solution he can think of is to drink until it settles down. So he rolls up to Eugene’s condo late enough that no one will notice him enter and tries to remember what the theme is supposed to be. At some point he realizes that there’s no theme, that they’re supposed to be celebrating the release of Eugene’s latest short film, and that Ryan is already drunk. 

It’s at about this time that Shane arrives. 

It’s more than a little gratifying to watch Shane’s eyes scan the room, to know without a doubt that he’s looking for Ryan, and then choosing the perfect moment to stand and approach him, albeit a little unsteadily. He doesn’t remember what he says, and whatever Shane replies is drowned out by the music. But Ryan hands him his half-finished drink and wanders off a moment later, deeper into the house and into the cool dark, wondering distantly why it suddenly hurts so much to be in Shane’s presence. 

He ends up in the kitchen, eventually, making himself another Jack and Coke. His hands are moving of their own accord; it takes him a moment to notice the presence at his side. 

Shane is saying, “I think we should talk.”

“Why?”

“I dunno.” He shrugs. “Just seems like the thing to do.”

He’s on the edge of refusing—there’s something volatile inside of him that he’s a little afraid of right now. It’s making him nervous, because he can’t identify it. It has something to do with Shane leaving before the sun rises, he thinks. And maybe something to do with Idaho, and the way he feels himself looking at Shane sometimes, and the way Shane looks back. 

But they end up next to the pool in Eugene’s backyard, where the underwater lights are casting everything in dreamy aquamarine shadows. Ryan feels himself swaying in time with the lapping of the water at the filters. He puts his drink down deliberately. 

“So,” says Shane. 

“So,” says Ryan, obstinate. 

“So, you’re angry.”

Ryan shrugs, avoiding his eyes in a way that feels notably immature. “I just, like, don’t understand why we’re doing this—”

“You don’t want to hook up anymore?”

“No, it’s just...why are we doing it like _this_?” Ryan asks. “Why are we acting like it’s not a thing when it clearly is becoming a thing?”

Shane just frowns at him. Ryan rubs at his eyes, trying to get his head to clear—it may have been a mistake to try to have this conversation drunk, but he honestly can’t imagine it happening sober at all. 

“It’s not that big a deal, Ryan.” Shane’s voice has gone quiet, detached. It’s unsettling. 

“Evidently not to you.”

“Don’t pin this all on me,” he retorts. But now there’s an edge to his words, a sharpness so rarely present. “It’s not my fault I don’t just want to be your fucking rebound.”

Ryan inhales sharply. “My fucking _rebound_? You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. I’ve been single for months. You know that’s not what this is.”

Shane makes a dismissive gesture with the hand not wrapped around his drink, eyes flashing. “Apparently I don’t know that. I honestly don’t think you fucking do either, frankly.”

“I can’t fucking believe—”

“You’re just bored, Ryan. Don’t pretend it’s more than it is, that you’re somehow good and virtuous and I’m just ruining everything—”

“What the fuck are you even talking about?” He realizes his voice has risen, in pitch and volume, and at some point that fact is going to attract attention. But he can’t fight the fire rising in his throat. “I just wanted to be with you, holy shit.”

“Sure,” says Shane, with a grim, condescending little laugh. “Okay.”

“I don’t know how this got so fucking complicated.” Ryan brushes a hand across his face, attempting to will the warmth from his cheeks, to mime Shane’s apparent detachment.

“I was trying to make it less complicated,” Shane mutters. 

“Bullshit,” Ryan replies. “And that whole rebound thing was bullshit also. You know that’s not true.”

“With you, I really fucking don’t,” Shane scoffs. “Why now, Ryan? We’ve known each other for years, and you just now decide that you’re into me? Two months after the worst break up of your life? Fucking convenient.”

He stands there dumbly for just a moment, and then suddenly is angrier than he’s ever been. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going home.”

He turns on his heel. He’s peripherally aware of Shane reaching out to stop him, which feels like a small victory, but he doesn’t stop. He allows himself one look back before closing the sliding door behind him, and sees Shane slumping into a deck chair, face in shadow. 

 

 

He finds an Uber home, but spends only a few moments in the rocking backseat before shouting for the driver to pull over. He tumbles out onto the curb before the vehicle has even come to a full stop, puking into a patch of dusty grass next to a stop sign, and by the time he finishes the Toyota has already sped off without him. 

So he starts walking. Alone, his feet are heavy, and weak. The street lights blur; a flash of vertigo hurls through him with every step. _It’s just us_ rings in his ears. This is unsustainable, he thinks vaguely. Maybe he won’t make it home. Maybe he’ll just lie down here. But then he’s in front of his building, his keys are in his hand, and he’s wondering if this is what rock bottom feels like, or something like it. 

 

 

In the morning, he crawls out of bed at a more reasonable hour than he expects and finds himself staring down at a cup of coffee that he doesn’t recall making. It’s Saturday; there’s no need to be up. But his laptop and headphones are calling him. It’s not terribly surprising that his first instinct at a time like this would be to reach for Unsolved. Film has always been a version of home, even if something sick twists inside him whenever Shane’s face appears on screen. 

He unplugs at noon, feeling the hangover ease enough to think about food. A ballcap goes on over greasy hair as he makes progress toward the elevator. There’s still something leaden in every step. 

Outside, there’s someone waiting for him on the front steps. Someone in a flannel. 

“Shane?” It’s rained overnight—not much water, just enough to pick up the dirt from the street and smear it across the world. Shane doesn’t look much better. He’s in glasses, and everything about him looks smudged, somehow. Indistinct and half-formed. He looks about how Ryan feels. 

“Hey.” Shane looks back over his shoulder, stands abruptly. His hips crack, like he’s been sitting there for a while. Waiting. “I was gonna text you, but—I dunno. Thought it’d be better in person.”

Something tightens in Ryan’s chest. “What?”

Shane isn’t looking at him. His eyes are on the ground and he’s fidgeting, like he’s trying to flicker out of the visual spectrum. “I think, the thing is—I think it’s just that I don’t want to be your rebound, and then get tossed aside, eventually. And it’s probably better if I’m not your fucking sidekick forever, anyways, maybe. So I should just quit you now, you know?”

He looks up, finally, but Ryan knows his own expression must be blank. Uncomprehending.

“So, I’m really sorry, but I think I’m gonna quit Unsolved.” He shrugs, eyes down again. “I’m sure you can find another co-host—Quinta, I dunno.”

“What?” He wishes his voice wasn’t so meager sounding. He wishes he could make himself blink, to clear the haze out of his eyes. “You’re really—you’re just gonna throw away everything we’ve worked for?”

“We?” Shane looks at him; there’s some leftover condescension there from the night before. “Come on, Ryan. You know Unsolved was always more your thing than mine.”

Ryan’s mouth moves. No words come out. 

Shane is talking again. Ryan can’t see his eyes, just the smooth plane of his eyelids as he looks at his own feet. “And it’s fine. I’ll start up something else. I have ideas.”

Is there something defensive in his words? Ryan decides not to wonder; he doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth for it.

“So, yeah. That’s it.”

Ryan knows he should probably say something, right now, but the fact of the matter is his throat is tight and the words won’t come and this is all very, very wrong. 

“So I’ll see you at work, I guess.” Shane’s feet shuffle. He leans forward, kisses Ryan on the cheek. Ryan doesn’t even have the strength to pull away. Shane turns, then. Trots down the steps. Is out of sight. 

He doesn’t look back.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Hay algunas cosas que decir  
>  Y otras cuantas que quedan por ahí_

An advanced game of musical chairs ensues; by the end of the week, Ryan’s still not sure he’s going to survive. Shane has traded seats with Sara, who has traded seats with Quinta, so now Ryan and Quinta are side by side. It’s all rather chaotic and definitively ridiculous. But, in the end, the Unsolved oath has been broken, and Shane is far, far away. Their face-swap picture no longer hangs between their desks. 

For the time being, he can avoid the implications of this. He can edit what remains of the Supernatural season and deal with filming True Crime, with finding someone _else_ to film True Crime with, in a few weeks. Quinta can fill in for the postmortems until then. As far as anyone else is concerned, they all seem to think Shane is just taking a break from Unsolved for a little while to catch up on a few other projects. Ryan doesn’t have the heart to correct them. It’s vaguely interesting that Shane doesn’t seem to either. 

It’s interesting, also, that Ryan isn’t sure he’s ever been so angry in his life. 

Because Shane has put Unsolved in jeopardy, and sometimes it feels like Unsolved is all Ryan really has, once you strip away all the bullshit. 

(It’s possible that he once thought he had Shane, also, but he’s working hard not to let that thought metastasize. Not to let the hurt spread.)

It’s no secret that a core ingredient of Unsolved is the dynamic between the two of them. Any replacement will undeniably change the vibe of the show—for better or for worse, it’s going to shake up the fanbase. They’re going to lose viewers. They’re going to lose momentum. It’s a hard gamble to make on the internet, when you can so quickly let go of your grip on whatever niche you’ve carved out for yourself. Ryan tells himself that the ache in his chest is anxiety about these sorts of tangible, quasi-professional concerns, rather than something deeper. Something he has a hard time putting a name to. Something to do with the red flannel that still manages to occupy his peripheral vision with remarkable intensity. 

On a Tuesday night, Shane texts him. Something swells inside him when he sees the notification; he ignores it. 

_I think I left a shirt at your place._

Ryan knows this. It’s possible he’s wearing it. He looks at the text for a long moment, then decides not to bother with an answer. 

 

 

“Are you okay?” Quinta asks, after they’ve finished the postmortem for the week. The camera is off, and so is the expression he pasted on for it. There must be something in his eyes, he thinks. All he feels is tired. 

He shrugs. “It’s all fucked up. You know.”

“So what are you gonna do about it?”

He makes an exasperated noise and reaches for his phone. “Why do I always have to be the one to fix things? He’s the one that decided he didn’t give a shit about me or the show or any other fucking thing besides his own fucking, I dunno—delusions?”

“Delusions,” Quinta deadpans. 

“What?”

“You think he’s just making that shit up?”

“What do you mean?” He frowns. “Have you talked to him?”

“No, but I’ve talked to Sara, and she has.” She narrows her eyes at him. “Regardless of whether you think his concerns are rational, it’s a little unfair to call him delusional.”

“At this point, I don’t really give a fuck about fair.” The bitterness is twisting painfully inside him; it’s worse, here in Ghoul HQ, surrounded by everything Shane has thought it necessary to sacrifice. 

Quinta rolls her eyes. “You’re both making this far more difficult than it has to be.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shrugs, getting to his feet. “We were never, like, a Thing. It shouldn’t be difficult.”

“Not a Thing,” she replies. “But kind of in the process of becoming one.”

“I think it’s pretty clear now that that’s not what was going to happen.”

He has the strange feeling, now, that he’s lost control of this conversation—that he’s not sure anymore which side he’s supposed to be arguing, or what his own point is. All he knows is that he’s angry, and everything’s a little bit fucked, and he doesn’t know how to fix any of it. 

 

 

Shane texts him again at midnight on Wednesday. It’s apropos of nothing; Ryan hasn’t replied to his last text. 

All Shane writes is, _I’m sorry._

Ryan thinks of a number of replies. Some of them pithy, some hurt. He looks out at the night, at the black that isn’t really black but tinted by reds and sepia yellows and beneath it all an inky, deep blue. He settles on _I’m sorry too,_ turns his phone off, and rolls over into sleep. 

 

 

The Red Cross blood truck returns to the parking lot on Friday, and so Ryan spends his lunch break mentally preparing himself for the sight of the needle. He allows himself to think back, even if it feels particularly dangerous at the moment to do so. Two months since his last donation. Four months without Helen. More and more blood birthed anew. 

Somehow, he doesn’t feel new at all. 

Afterwards, he’s handed a cookie and lead over to a plastic table out of the sun to wait at until it’s relatively certain he won’t pass out. Within seconds, a long silhouette has sat down opposite him. 

“Ryan,” says Shane. 

Ryan’s eyes are on the table. He says nothing. The area is empty, save the two of them—the closest soul is Eugene, reclining with his eyes closed a few yards away while his blood flows into a bag near his feet. 

“Ryan, I realize I may have acted rashly—”

“I don’t want to do this right now,” Ryan cuts in, but then pauses in surprise at his own words. His voice is strangely quiet. “It’s funny, though, isn’t? You were right.”

“About what?”

“That us getting together would only fuck everything up.”

Shane sighs. “I didn’t really—that’s just some shit I said to justify why we shouldn’t, why _I_ shouldn’t—”

“But it doesn’t matter, I guess,” Ryan continues. He gathers up a used napkin with an air of finality. “The damage is done. I know I started Unsolved but I guess I thought you actually gave a shit about it too—”

“Ryan, please,” Shane says. “You know I do. There’s just some shit—”

“I really don’t want to have this conversation at work.” Ryan is on his feet already, avoiding eye contact. 

“Then we’ll figure it out elsewhere,” Shane pleads, reaching out for him. “Tonight. Let’s go get a drink.”

Finally, Ryan looks up, and lets a grim little smile twist his mouth. “I don’t think us drinking together is a good idea anymore.”

The desperation in Shane’s expression stays with him long after he turns away. 

 

 

He had promised himself, once, that he wasn’t going to get hurt again. That he was going to let new blood protect him. He had thought that going along with Shane’s various attempts to avoid a relationship would aid in this effort—there was something safe in the notion of maintaining an arm’s length from each other, even when they were closer than they had ever been in every way possible. 

Somehow, they’ve gone off course. 

He realizes it late in the night on Friday. Sleep has evaded him; he’s taken refuge in editing, as per usual. It fits within the blink of an eye; a few frames, a few seconds at most. The camera was still on, in Idaho, when Shane split his head open. He hits the door frame because he’s not looking where he’s going. He’s looking at Ryan. 

There’s something there, in his expression. Something deep. It’s a specter, or a little like one. 

And Ryan’s caught it on camera. 

He watches the clip several times, until his vision blurs. Still, when he closes his eyes, Shane’s expression is still there. The close, intimate fondness. A hint of something like reverence. The warmth of it. 

Then there’s blood, and Ryan watches himself rush forward, watches himself panic, a little, and take Shane’s hand. Their eyes connect. He analyzes his own expression carefully. The pixels that are his eyes, the collection of colors that is his face. Once he’s started, he can’t stop—he goes back through the episodes, farther and farther, watching both of them as though they are a species to be studied. Once he makes it to the Brent days he switches to the Test Friends. Soylent. Crossfit. The IV hangover cure. 

It’s been so long. 

They’ve been orbiting each other this whole time, worlds spinning in tandem without pause. Watching each other out of the corner of their eyes. Waiting. 

Ryan watches, and watches, and watches. 

And then he thinks, _of course._

 

 

Despite all the work they’ve put into the complex new seating arrangement, Shane disappears from work for a few days. Sara catches Ryan staring at the empty desk one too many times and eventually crosses the room to tilt her head imploringly at him. 

“I’m not going to tell you what you need to do, because I think you know,” she says, her face twisting into one of her funny little smiles. 

Ryan hums, but says nothing. 

“It’ll all be okay, Ryan Bergara,” she lilts. He gives her what he hopes is a thankful look. 

At lunch, he heads for Shane’s place. 

At some point, a spare key has come into his possession. It was handed over with very little fanfare at the time, but now it weighs heavily in Ryan’s hand. He knocks, and when there’s no answer, lets himself in, padding through the empty living room to where he can see Shane’s figure draped over a lawn chair in a sunny patch of backyard. There’s a mug of long forgotten tea on the scrubby grass beside him.

Shane looks up when the sliding door opens behind him. 

“Shane,” says Ryan.

“Ryan,” says Shane. 

“I can’t live like this,” Ryan deadpans. 

“Like what?”

“Without you.”

“Oh.” Shane’s eyes are obfuscated by sunglasses but, still, Ryan’s catches one of his eyebrows raise. He’s silenced for a moment, then sits up a little in his reclined chair. “Then should we go back to pretending we’re friends with benefits, or something?”

Ryan crosses his arms. “No.”

“Then what?”

“Read between the fucking lines, Shane,” snaps Ryan. “Jesus christ.”

Shane slumps forward to rub at the bridge of his nose tiredly. “I don’t know if—” he breaks himself off, staring at the ground. “I just don’t know.”

“Let’s go get Chipotle,” Ryan says abruptly. “I’ll buy you a burrito.”

Shane shakes his head. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Fine,” replies Ryan, exasperated. “I’ll buy you a burrito and you buy me one.”

Shane looks at his hands for one long moment, then caves. “Alright.”

It’s late in the afternoon; Chipotle is half empty. Still, they take their food outside and sit on the curb of the silent street, shoulder to shoulder. Shane perches his burrito bowl on his bony knees and says nothing for the first few minutes until, finally, he murmurs, “I’m just not sure I believe you.”

“You don’t believe that I want to be with you even though I am saying it right now. Like, the literal words are coming out of my mouth. I want to be with you. You’re not a rebound. Oh my god.” Ryan sighs. “I’m actually really fucking pissed that you quit Unsolved, by the way, and I _still_ want to fucking be with you regardless.”

Shane just looks at him, expression inscrutable. 

“I don’t think you appreciate how difficult it was for me to say all that just now.” Ryan rips a corner off his burrito with more force than necessary. 

“No, I understand,” Shane replies, after a beat. 

“I couldn’t say it before.” Ryan shrugs. “I don’t know why. The words just wouldn’t fucking, like—”

“I understand,” Shane says, quieter. 

They chew silently for several long moments, and then Shane speaks again. “Do you think we can salvage this?”

Ryan looks over at him. Predictably, he’s wearing his flannel. Ryan can hardly see the blood on it, anymore. All of it is a uniform, vibrant red in the dying light of the afternoon. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Maybe we just need to start over, a little bit,” Shane says, sticking his fork decisively into a pile of guacamole. 

“We can be new together,” Ryan agrees, through a mouthful of beans and rice. 

“I think I’m in love with you,” Shane says suddenly. 

“That’s...a lot.” But Ryan’s smiling to himself, and then laughing, almost, and Shane’s laughing too. It’s all a little bit absurd, maybe. The two of them sitting here, confessing, spinning themselves into something new. It’s possible Ryan would do anything for him. 

He reaches for Shane’s hand tentatively, lets their fingers intertwine. It feels far more difficult than anything else they’ve ever done. “I think I’m kind of in love with you too, big guy.”

Shane lets out a breath. “Cool.”

“Cool,” Ryan sighs. The sun is just beginning to set. 

And the world keeps turning, spinning softly back into its proper place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the words in the summary are from Mon Laferte's "Cielito de Abril." Soft vibes hell yeaaahh.   
> My only goal at the outset of this was so get more people to listen to The Chain, and I think I've accomplished that. Proud moment.   
> Honestly, though, y'all have made this a pleasure to write. I've loved loved loved reading your comments. What a wonderful, supportive fandom. A thousand thank yous <333  
> also, did I just write a motherfuckin happy ending?? who am i honestly

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com


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